Pomposity

It's no so much that, Phleg, as the fact that sloppy grammar and/or punctutation can totally alter meaning. Therefore, ultimately, you're the one that loses out...

What are you talking about!? That is exactly the sort of comment that I'm ranting over! WHERE's the sloppy grammer and tell me how I can get better! Not some pissy little 'oh, you're the one who's losing out' blah blah blah. It's so bland and pointless. People should be able to seek friendly advice at this site. You don't have to tell me that my work is suffering because of grammatical problems - I KNOW THAT - that's why i'm not published!

Many of the postings picking at grammar on the threads are tongue in cheek phleg..... don't let it get to you! People certainly DO get loads of friendly advice on this site - it's well known for it....

Oh I don't doubt that at all - it's the few who get my goat...

i have done a lot of creative writing workshops as both participant and tutor and whenever i am teaching i assure people that worries such as spelling should be thrown out of the window at that creative point ... as they can interfere with people's confidence and block their writing ... but that is at the CREATIVE point ... the difference comes with publishing work ... i.e. making it public in any way ... and that includes online publishing ... at this point care has to be taken of things like spelling punctuation and grammar because it will affect the reader adversely and if you are making your work public then you are in a contract with the reader ... i would not want anyone to be discouraged from writing by such concerns or feel excluded from the site ... and phleg ... liana makes a good point ... the atmosphere on these discussion boards is one of healthy piss taking ... (and some less healthy but we wont go into that ...) the key is being positive about your own writing and in making it as accessible to the reader as possible ... and also the other thing to take on board about the site is that you get out what you put in ... if you want constructive criticism of your work then the best place to start is through offering it to others ... it works in a tit for tat fashion and nobody is going to respond to being ordered to give anyone else feedback ...

point taken...the problem with rants is that you forget to see both sides of the point. I realise that grammer and good writing is vital to the readers pleasure - maybe I just wish it wasn;t so... but I do endeavour to scour all my work with a fine tooth comb and weed out those nasty errors. It's just so dull after the rush of creativity...

yes it is ... but it's the craft part ... and that is the majority of it ... and i have seen people's (including my own) improve as a result of being part of the site phleg ... so it does work ...

I agree, Phleg, it's a bloody dull and boring task. I agree wholeheartedly with Fish as well, though. All I was saying was, that there are many people that are put off by such errors and it'd be a shame if they didn't enjoy your work because of it. It was in no way meant as a reflection on your own work, just a general comment.

I don't usually get involved with topics such as this, as there isn't much scope for piss-taking, but I think I may have an answer to your problem phleg. If you have a problem with your spelling and grammar instead of writing directly into the 'posting panel' at the bottom of the threads compose your stuff in Word and run the spellcheck and grammar check over it to correct errors. Then you simply cut and paste it into the 'posting panel'. the only drawback to this is the Americanisms, some of which you can't avoid, even if you select British English. I hope this helps :-)

smelling? my @!#$. HA HARRRR!!!

Thanks for the support and advice. Maybe I was a little harsh and perhaps I should look closer to home before criticising others. As far as grammer/spelling goes I guess I j see it as my main weakness and would rather not have to bother - when I see people gloating over their keener eye, it just frustrates me. I do work very hard on this aspect and, as fish, andrea and mississippi have pointed out, it does bare fruit (or bare phwoot - who knows/hoo nose...)!

I suppose that when you are writing, it can take some considerable time to get the words lined up just so, to put across what you want. It is quite easy to spend ten minutes wondering about a particular sentence. Once you are finished, you can spend an hour or so wondering if there is anything to improve the piece. But five minutes proof-reading will give the piece a lift with very little effort. Don't worry about grammar and spelling when you write, just concentrate on saying what you want to say, but afterwards, a quick five minutes will weed out the main problems. The most common problems are :- there / their and its/it's (The apostrophe is only for 'it is', so "It's a nice day today" is right and so is "He looked at the door, its paint was peeling" ) I'm no lover of grammar myself, whereas I know that some people delight in it. I cheerfully misuse commas all the time.

I find that five minutes proof-reading doesn't actually help my work very much because the specific errors that I make and the words I miss-spell etc. are INVISIBLE to me. I can't see my own mistakes, only other people can. That's why it's so useful to be in a writers' group of some kind where you can look over each others work before submitting it, if only for spelling or grammatical mistakes, but ideally for style and mood and content and all kinds of things. The electronic word-checks pick up certain mistakes but not otheres, and for the more subtle stuff like where a comma should go or whether something ought to be a colon or a semi-colon, or whether a sentence is too long (like this one) they're useless. I strongly recomment you sign-up to a writers' group on Yahoo or Smartgroups or somewhere and let a couple of fellow writers look over your work before you put it on the site. Obviously you will have to provide the service for them in return. As for posts on these forums, I wouldn't have thought it was worth bothering about technical perfection unless you're trying to impress somebody!

I don't think anyone's trying to impress anybody. It's just that, after a while, it becomes a habit (probably one of the better ones!).

As the person who started all of this, I never meant to come across as pompous or arrogant. I wasn't having a general dig at writers at abc or suggesting that everything should be perfect. I was actually having a snide shot at abc editors. Perhaps I should have been a lot more straightforward. . . . I think that stories that are marked up as pick of the day should be spellchecked and edited by abc staff before they're billed. These are the pieces that agents/publishers/browsers will look at first and represent the rest of the site on a daily basis. It frustrates me that abc - such an excellent site generally - should let itself down like this. The stories are always written well and show the level of writing etc etc but basic mistakes stand out a mile and are so off-putting. I'm sorry if I have offended anyone by sounding off, or discouraged people from posting their work because they think that this is a school environment. Next time I decide to post I'll be a lot more specific, but I hope that this goes someway to alleviating any unhappiness I might have caused amongst general users.

Ithink getting published is hard man... I doubt very much that publishers are looking through material on this site, and if they are, my apologies to them. I feel the only way of the vast majority of us getting published is if we start our own publishing house. It could happen man... what with 4500+ users on this website, if everybody donated a quid a week, that's £4500, if everyone donated £2 a week then that's £9000, enough perhaps to print some copies of a book with a compilation of long short stories, short short stories, poetry, haiku - other. The only way it would work though is if we published a book four times a year, and in each edition we put a selection of different authors. Those authors get to choose which piece they want to put in it, the piece their most fond of, regardless of whether anyone else thinks its good or not. Writing is a personal thing and we all have pieces we feel particulalry attached too and would love to see in print. Well anyway a quid a week isn't much, I think most of us could manage that, or even two quid a week. Or you could have a system were the minimum amount was one pound but if you felt like contributing a bit more then you could do, that way rich and poor get eqaul rights. Though everyone would have to put aside selfishness of wanting to see your name in their first. You contribute for the good of the whole community and to help your fellow writer see his dream become reality, eventually you get your turn. You could advertise it on the front page, have an address were people could send their postal orders or cheques. Not everyone has a credit card so you would have to think alternative ways of paying. Even if a special bank account was set up, and people who were in on this knew the account number and could put money in that account once a week or once a month. Then two people would have the authority to withdraw the money, two respected members of the community who everyone trusts and knows won't run off with the money. Not sure how you would select who goes in first, perhaps you could put everyones name in a hat. And draw out ten to fifteen names. then put those names aside into another hat, so that the next issue has ten to fifteen different people. I dunno man, now I think about it, maybe it might not work. Is an idea and you only live once, why spend your life conforming to the publishers money making rules in order to fullfill your dreams; when with the right thinking and unity you can achieve those goals yourself, hell if it worked you might even make history. Whichever way you look at it a quid a week isn't much to contribute. and if you have to wait a long time before you see your piece in print then you should be smiling in the knowledge that you are helping your fellow writers see theirs in print. But no elitist stuff man. No clique of well-known authors on the site, or favouritism. Everybody has the same opportunity. I know it's just a hopeless dream, but when people get their stuff together and work in unity great things can happen. And you don't even have to sell the book if you don't want to, just give it away for free, hopefully if everybody contributes a quid a week, then it should cover the cost. Anyway enough crazy notions, gonna lie down for a bit and rest my aching head..

Marina, I've had to draft and redraft my response to this one a number of times. It would simply not be possible for me to sit and proof-read the work of other people. I read, on average sixty pieces a day. Even to do just the two pieces a day would take up a significant chunk of time, because the writer and I would have to go back and forth with drafts. Also, to be quite candid, I'm not particularly interested in becoming a proof-reader. I enjoy very much reading people's stories and poems, spotting the ones that have imagination, wit, energy, emotion, style and technique. Proof-reading is not what I'm here for. I've just spent ten months in my other job going through 400 page documents word by word checking them and it is boring and soul-destroying. When I write to tell someone that their story or poem is to be poem of the day, I'm usually hoping that they'll be pleased, that it will give them some encouragement and that the feedback I give them about why I selected it will be of some value. If anyone is sending a piece to a publisher, I would absolutely advise them to proof-read it, several times, and the only real way to do that is on paper. It is very hard to do it on screen. Print it out, go through it with a red pen. Word by word. Don't read the piece on the sentence-level, because you will only see what you EXPECT is there, not necessarily what is actually there. If you want help in doing this, I'm sure that some of the other writers here might help on a tit-for-tat basis. But this website is not a proof-reading site. (If it was, we'd be charging you. Have a look at how much proof-readers charge. )

Andrew is right. I don't expect anyone to correct my spelling or punctuation on this web site. That would be unrealistic of me. I have noticed that no matter how hard I try, and I do try hard, I still manage to post pieces with errors. It happens. I feel silly, but there it is. It is a reflection on me, not the site or the editors. I do find, though, that it helps to let a piece sit for a day, or at least a few hours, before posting. One last look before posting often reveals errors that I had missed several times over the course of days. Of course, it is always possible to fix things after posting as well.

This is Andrea's advice as well, and I think it is good advice. A piece that you finish and think is perfect may reveal a number of errors or places for improvement when you look at it two days later. I usually find that after I've finished a piece I feel either euphoric or very negative - two days perspective help me look at it more honestly.

I think I can go along with the rest of the comments. Another way, that I've found, is to have your stuff published as an ebook. I did this with a novel on another site. Although I had gone through it god knows how many bloody times, once it was beyond correction all the mistakes came to light, including the omission of a whole sentence. No, I can't stand anyone being pedantic but 'Funk', I notice you've dropped a Y off your usual name - or is this the new U?:-)

it was an accidental typing error - a spelling mistake. sorry for seeming thick: but what does pedantic mean? I wish I hadn't typed all that out now, I was very tired at the time. I had had about 5 hours sleep in the space of three days. After reading it today I feel a bit embarrassed, I'am always posting crazy stuff like this man, glad noone responded to it, not sure if that makes me feel worse or happier, I pray that oneday they will come up with the technology for an edit function in these forums. I am living in fear of myself at the moment, and what I might post in my chaotic moments. yesterday was one of those days. Too little sleep can send me a bit crazy. Was an interesting experience though as it can be a bit trippy; but not one I want to repeat. * realises he's posted yet another chaotic mass of words * Somedays I feel like I know where Delirium is coming from in the sandman.

Funk, pedantic is nasty. Taking the piss is just havin' a chuckle. I was taking the piss.

I see, have learnt a new word today - pedantic. is ok I knew were taking the piss, I aint bothered. Just not too hot at talking in these forums. Is hard to communicate like this. Is too easy to misinterpret what people mean etc. I use a mass of words to say something when just a few would do better.

Isn't life short, not just the experience but the word itself. It's far easier to spell the word than to live it. You can spell life wrong very easily but it is far easier to live life wrongly. I'd rather spell a few words wrongly than mess up the life thing wondering if I'd actually spelt it wrong at all. Maybe it's just the way I see it. Damn, it's that Sunday thing again......

I'll go along with that, P. Anara.

Hi to all, from a newbie to ABC. It has been interesting reading all the comments to the attitude of those who seek to critiscise the work of others and I must admit to being happy to see that ABC seems to have a much better "community spirit" than other writers and poets groups which makes a refreshing change. I write poetry purely for my own enjoyment and never take more than 20 or 30 minutes to write one. This tends to lead me to be critiscised for my style/content on many an occasion. Whilst I would agree with several postees that grammar/spelling and punctuation are important, the most important thing of all is that the poet or writers work comes from the heart and gets accross the intended message or creates the required scene in the readers mind. All other considerations must be secondary. Keep up the great site! Ian Woolger(wogzie)